● Sold outright · Restaurant pricing & profit calculator · case file 07
Pricing software, built from a kitchen and sold to three of them
Built a pricing and profit calculator for restaurants — recipe costing, wastage and the margin a menu price actually returns — specified from operations experience rather than guesswork.
Overview
Built a pricing and profit calculator for restaurants — recipe costing, wastage and the margin a menu price actually returns — specified from operations experience rather than guesswork.
My role
Built and sold as a product
Timeline
Jan — Jun 2026
Sold outright
● Impact overview
- Three restaurants bought it outright₹70,000 each, ₹2,10,000 in total — paid for and owned as a complete piece of software, not a subscription.
- Costed from a live kitchenRecipe costing, wastage and the margin a menu price actually returns, specified from operations experience rather than guesswork.
- Ended cleanlyThree customers do not justify indefinite support, so the product was closed after the sales and the knowledge went into ELTH.
01
Situation
Most restaurants price their menu on instinct, because the alternative is a spreadsheet nobody maintains. They know what a dish sells for. They do not reliably know what it costs them once wastage, portioning drift and vendor price changes are counted — which means they do not know which items are carrying the business and which are quietly draining it.
02
What I built
A pricing and profit calculator: enter your recipe, your vendor costs and your wastage, and see the margin each menu price actually returns. Purpose-built and small enough that an owner would actually open it, rather than a system they would need training for.
03
Sold, then closed
Three restaurants bought it outright at ₹70,000 each. Not a trial, not a subscription — they paid for the software and owned it.
I closed it after that. Three customers does not justify an indefinite support commitment, and I would rather end a product cleanly than let it become a slow tax on my time. The knowledge went into ELTH.
04
Why me
Because I knew the operations first. I costed food in a live kitchen at seventeen and have run vendor pricing, wastage and margin ever since. The hard part of a tool like this is never the arithmetic — it is knowing which numbers an owner actually has to hand, and which ones they will make up if you ask for them.
05